Black Afterlives Matter

Cadwell Turnbull, No Gods, No Monsters: a Novel

It begins, as so many stories do today, with a leaked police video. A police body cam catches a Boston PD officer putting two bullets in a suspect. The twist is, the suspect this time is a lycanthrope. Though City Hall tries to bury it, evidence soon gets out, and the whole world knows. We have proof that the monsters and demons of folklore exist in the world of science and technology.

Cadwell Turnbull's second novel exists on multiple levels simultaneously. We can browse his text for parallels with our modern world, and how that speaks directly to us. It's easy, and tempting, to point out resemblances to BLM, QAnon, late capitalism, and other looming contemporary issues. Turnbull's monsters are metaphors for violent, segregated postmodern America.

Such rigid analysis, though, loses the nuance of Turnbull's prose poetry. Turnbull tells multiple overlapping stories of ordinary, civic-minded people trying to pay their bills and improve their communities. These individual stories, however, unfold against the background of an American society where the monsters of myth and fable, the phantoms of campfire tales and bedtime stories, have been forced back into daylight.

In and around Boston, a group of "smash the system" anarchists find their loyalties torn. Their commitment to peaceful resistance has always included BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and other marginalized groups. But do werewolves and techno-mages count as marginalized? Ideals that seemed unambiguous in theory, turn vague when tested, because seriously, do vampires and shapeshifters need civil rights?

In the US Virgin Islands, a territorial senator with high ideals has concealed that she's a weredog, and her sister walks through walls. But a secret society brings her information that could close her childhood trauma. Should she risk her career, and the trust of her constituents, to solve the biggest mystery of her life? And where does she turn when her personal trauma proves to be part of a secret civil war threatening humanity?

Meanwhile, the story's "Third Person Omniscient" narrative voice struggles to reconcile the seemingly divergent secrets and lies driving the characters. How, the voice wonders, can I speed these poor, blind people toward their resolutions? Soon the voice peels off and begins cross-examining the characters in their moments of vulnerability. We realize that the story has become self-aware.

Cadwell Turnbull

Does this sound like a lot of threads? Turnbull doesn't deny it. With his shifting perspective, his cast of thousands, and his multiple short stories converging on one destination, he has created the Winesburg, Ohio of contemporary dark fantasy. He uses horror tropes and political hot buttons to tell a story of literary depth and subtlety. The product dwells in the liminal space between genre fiction and literature.

Don't let that intimidate you, though. Turnbull writes with a casual voice and brisk pace that never lags (except maybe once, for two pages around page 185). Even when discussing revisionist economics or the many-worlds theory of quantum physics, he doesn't forget that writing is about the relationship with his audience, and he keeps us engaged with characters and story.

This hybrid form works in service of a plot with a message. Turnbull's characters, human and monster, draw from America's marginalized population: Black and Latinx, queer, traumatized, colonized. People who the majority culture have kept at arm's length throughout living memory. People the majority culture has dismissed as criminals, ingrates, and monsters.

What, Turnbull wants us to ask, happens when America's monsters become visible? When we can no longer pretend we don't see them? Like Slender Man, these monsters have always been there, and once they force their way into our perception, we see the footprint they've left on history. Once we've seen them, we can no longer forget them… until, Turnbull suggests, we start to forget them anyway.

In the final pages, Turnbull demonstrates the lengths some will take to ensure our collective forgetting. This opens new and darker doors, forcing a conflict that didn't have to happen. But, like in so many issues today, the powerful minority's refusal to face facts means someone has to take action. We ordinary people are forced along.

It isn't necessarily obvious at first that this is the beginning of a series. Though it says "Book One of the Convergence Saga" on the back of the dust jacket, it's written small enough to miss it. I'm eager to see how Turnbull handles the story threads he's introduced in this volume. Maybe that's the highest praise I can offer, to say I'm ready to see where things go from here.